“Of course not, I don’t want things to be different. I want things to be the same as they’ve always been,” Joe said.
Sitting at the small square table, his glance alternating between the half-empty beer bottle and the red rims of Dan’s bleary eyes, Joe did not feel like admitting he had been trying for days to live on in the old way and that his acceptance of Hodgins’ faith and the baptism had been a gesture toward opinion in the village.
Late at night he left the hotel and walked down the old road to the house. The nights were cool near the lake in the early fall. In the kitchen he hung his coat on the back of a chair. He made some strong tea. Lottie had always liked weak tea. He drank the tea and then took off his collar and tie, twisting the tie carefully around the collar. And he thought of Dan Higgins and Hodgins and Jerry Hammond and Harvey Simpson and wanted to be friendly with everybody, though he would always like Dan better than anybody in the congregation. He was glad to be one of the congregation. It didn’t do a man any good to stand alone. He could be quite comfortable in the village. Taking off his boots to put them under the stove damper, he felt that he was growing old and valued most a feeling of security.
Dates of Original Publication
All the Years of Her Life, The New Yorker, June 1935
An Enemy of the People, Scribner’s Magazine, September 1936
No Man’s Meat, Black Manikan Press, Paris. 1931
The Fugitive, The North American Review, Summer 1938
A Predicament, Scibner’s Magazine, July 1928
A Country Passion, transition, March 1928
The Chiseler, The New Yorker, August 1930
Watching and Waiting, Redbook, September 1936
A Sick Call, Atlantic Monthly, July 1932
A Cap for Steve, Esquire, October 1952
Now That April’s Here, This Quarter, October 1929
Very Special Shoes, Story, March-April 1943
Lunch Counter, The New Yorker, December 1931
Rejected One, The New Yorker, December 1933
An Old Quarrel, The Atlantic, May 1933
The Shining Red Apple, The New Yorker, November 1935
The Voyage Out, The New Yorker, June 1936
Soldier Harmon, Scribner’s Magazine, August 1928
The Young Priest, The New Yorker, September 1930
Mr. & Mrs. Fairbanks, Harper’s Bazaar, September 1933
An Escapade, The New Yorker, November 1928
Rigamarole, Story, June 1935
An Autumn Penitent, The Second American Caravan: A Year-book of American Literature, 1928
Questions for Discussion and Essays
1. Examine Callaghan’s language. What types of words are largely missing from his prose and what impact does this have on the way you read the story? Discuss Callaghan’s use of language with reference to the stories.
2. Many of Callaghan’s stories are about objects, such as items of clothing. How does Callaghan evolve his use of a single object into the focus of a story?
3. Describe how Callaghan plays on the theme of desire and how the characters cope with the challenges and limitations imposed upon them by the world they live in. Are such challenges and questions of priorities important in a story, and if so, why?
4. Callaghan does not moralize in his stories yet many of them raise questions about the morality of the story’s outcome. Discuss how Callaghan uses the short story and his focus on a particular issue or event in order to illustrate a particular point. How do certain stories make us, as readers, respond to these events or issues?
5. In his account of the summer of 1928 with some of the giants of Modernism is Paris, Callaghan recounted that there was a sense that authors such as Hemingway were attempting to refresh language by being more direct and writing about “the thing itself.” In light of other Modernist authors, how is Callaghan adding his own style and approach to writing to the Modernist milieu?
Selected Related Reading
Allen, Walter Ernest. The Short Story in English. Oxford
University Press, 1981. (Contains a chapter on Morley Callaghan.)
Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio.
Introduced by Malcolm Cowley. New Edition. Milestone Editions, 1960.
Callaghan, Barry. Barrelhouse Kings. McArthur & Company,
1998.
Callaghan, Morley. A Literary Life. Reflection and
Reminiscences 1928–1990. Exile Editions, 2008.
Conron, Brandon. Morley Callaghan. Twayne, 1966.
Dennis, Richard. British Journal of Canadian Studies, 1999.
(Contains an essay by Richard Dennis: “Morley Callaghan
and the Moral Geography of Toronto.”)
Farrell, James T. Studs Lonigan (A Trilogy).
Pete Hamill (editor). Library of America, 1998.
Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. Margaret Cohen (editor).
Norton Critical Editions, 1998.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Complete Short Stories. Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1998.
Joyce, James. The Dubliners. Penguin, 1999.
de Maupassant, Guy. The Complete Short Stories of Guy de
Maupassant, 1955. Artine Artinian (editor). Penguin, 1995.
May, Charles Edward. The Short Story: The Reality Of
Artifice. Twayne, 1995.
O’Connor, Frank. The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short
Story, with an introduction by Russell Banks. Melville
House, 2011.
Snider, Norman. “Why Morley Callaghan Still Matters,”
Globe and Mail, 25 October, 2008.
Walsh, William. A Manifold Voice: Studies in Commonwealth
Literature. Chatto & Windus, 1971.
White, Randall. Too Good to Be True: Toronto in the 1920s.
Dundurn, 1993.
Wilson, Edmund. O Canada: An American’s Notes on
Canadian Culture. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, l964.
Woodcock, George. “Callaghan’s Toronto: The Persona of a
City.” Journal of Canadian Studies 7-2 (1972) 21-24.
Of Interest on the Web
www.MorleyCallaghan.ca – The official site of the Morley Callaghan Estate
www.cbc.ca/rewind/sirius/2012/03/01/morley-callaghan/ Rewind With Michael Enright: An Hour With Morley Callaghan. Thursday, March 1, 2012, CBC Radio One. This hour-long broadcast features conversations with Morley Callaghan and a splendid commentary.
www2.athabascau.ca/cll/writers/english/writers/mcallaghan.php – Athabasca University site
www.editoreric.com/greatlit/authors/Callaghan.html – The Greatest Authors of All Time site
www.cbc.ca/lifeandtimes/callaghan.htm – Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) site
Exile Online Resource
www.ExileEditions.com has a section for the Exile Classics Series, with further resources for all the books in the series.
Editor’s Endnotes
When Morley Callaghan gathered fifty-seven stories together for Morley Callaghan’s Stories (1959) he did not order the stories chronologically or provide dates of publication. He said he liked to think that a great story stood for what it was, in and of itself, whether he had written it when he was twenty-two or forty-five.
In his later years, when he published The Lost and Found Stories of Morley Callaghan in 1985, he followed the same procedure. In these four volumes, the order is, to all intents and purposes, random and undated (the publication dates, and place of publication for the stories, however, have been provided at the back of each book). He looked back over these stories and, just as he had edited his novel, A Passion in Rome, and rewritten the long story, The Enchanted Pimp (now titled Dubuque), so he eliminated habits of phrase and also tightened slack paragraphs and lines before he died.
Not all the stories Morley Callaghan wrote and published are in these four volumes. There are stories he did not want reprinted. Several stories that had appeared in A Native Argosy (1929) and Now That April’s Here (1936), he
left out of Morley Callaghan’s Stories (1959); I have restored all but one of these, continuing to leave out a story he very much disliked. Nor have I included all the stories he published after WWII when he was, by his own admission, losing interest in the short story form. From his point of view, then, these four volumes are a collection more complete than he would have necessarily cared for. The stories still not included, whether early or late, can be found by scholarly readers if they wish, and they can make of them what they will. Meanwhile, these are the ninety-seven stories he would have been prepared to put in the hands of readers at large and other writers.
In That Summer in Paris, Morley Callaghan describes how — only a few days off the boat — he and his wife, Loretto, went looking for Ernest Hemingway:
“The address we had was care of the Guaranty Trust Co. We didn’t bother with it. In the afternoon we went to Shakespeare and Co., Sylvia Beach’s famous bookshop on the rue de l’Odeon. Shakespeare and Co., which had published Joyce’s Ulysses, was simply a good-sized, pleasant, uncommercial-looking bookstore. There was one rather large book-lined room, with another smaller one adjoining. At the desk sat a woman whom I knew, from pictures I had seen, to be Miss Beach. She was a fair, handsome woman in a severe suit, in her forties, I would have said; an English-woman; and in her manner there was something a bit severe and mannish. Yet she was an American. Having published Ulysses, she had become a famous woman. Writers in Paris, at least those who wrote in English, came often to her door. Her shop was a shrine for the Joyce lovers. Approaching the desk, I introduced myself and wondered if she could give me Hemingway’s address. Without batting an eyelash, she told me she wasn’t sure whether Hemingway was in town, nor if he were, whether she could be able to locate him before she heard from him. But if I would leave my own address she would make an effort to see that it was passed on.
“Immediately I was unbelieving. The brush-off came a little too smoothly. Thanking her for the major effort I pretended to believe she would put forth, I rejoined Loretto and we busied ourselves seeing what books she had on her shelves. Suddenly Miss Beach left her desk and approached us. Had I seen the piece about my work in the Harvard Hound and Horn, she asked, handing it to me, then leaving us. ‘See,’ I whispered to my wife, ‘she knows who I am and she knows Hemingway’s address and won’t give it to me . . . Come on.’ Returning the Hound and Horn to Miss Beach’s desk, we departed. No doubt she was right in protecting Hemingway from callers, just as she protected Joyce, but I was too young and arrogant to have respect for her consideration for her friends.”
Callaghan and Hemingway found each other and their tangled relationship ended as it had to, but the piece in the Hound and Horn, never before reprinted, was written by R.P. Blackmur, eventually one of the leaders of the New Criticism. This was the first notice of Callaghan’s work by a major critic.
“In September, 1928, Mr. Callaghan published his first novel, Strange Fugitive, very much in the Chicago-Paris-Hemingway measure of hardboiled realism. It dealt with Toronto bootleggers and hence appealed to, if it did not reach, the same romantic American heart that just now takes its eternal pleasure in such plays as Broadway, Crime, and The Front Page. The subject matter and the superficies of the treatment — ‘hard’ description free of simile, colloquial dialogue, and a compact air of physical violence — gave the book its interest and its success. The interest lay perhaps in the ease with which the American sincerely takes up the hardboiled pose; and the success was the success of the school . . .
“A Native Argosy is made up of fourteen short stories and two longer ones — ‘An Autumn Penitent’ and ‘In His Own Country.’ The emphasis of the school is still present both in treatment and subject matter, but with a notable difference in donnée, in the conception of the theme. There is a paragraph in Santayana’s Soliloquy on Dickens which runs as follows:
I do not know whether it was Christian charity or naturalistic insight, or a mixture of both (for they are closely akin) that attracted Dickens particularly to the deformed, the half-witted, the abandoned, or those impeded or misunderstood by virtue of some singular inner consecration. The visible moral of these things, when brutal prejudice does not blind us to it, comes very near to true philosophy; one turn of the screw, one flash of reflection, and we have understood nature and human morality and the relation between them.
“It is not meant to compare Dickens with Callaghan or even to suggest an identity of motive between them; but Santayana’s paragraph admirably applies to the pair of long stories which close this volume and occasionally to the shorter pieces preceding them. It is in terms of ‘some singular inner consecration’ that each tale is conceived, and Mr. Callaghan has that delicacy so much more important than verbal delicacy, the delicacy of accumulated perceptions, which brings the senses in the end to a grasp of recognition. The moral of his characters is made plain because their fate is understood. No judgment is imposed, no apology entered; catastrophe is seen as the particular harmony of circumstance — as this man or that woman follows to its conclusion some prejudice, some stupidity, some deformity of mind or spirit.
“The book is ‘hard’ in its school and has no illusions; because the characters the book expresses are so patently full of illusions. Almost the only color the author lends to his creatures is a curious equanimity with which their ultimate attitudes are invested; their instincts, their animal spirits, are just to the event. Possibly this effect is obtained because the author refrains from metaphor and rhetoric in dealing with death, suicide, and insanity: so that the metaphor is character and the rhetoric action.
“In the last century Maupassant, Chekhov, and Stephen Crane all sometimes wrote short stories of this order. Each forced his sensibility to take a certain form as it accepted experience, and each was critical to an extreme in his fidelity to that form. Mr. Callaghan also has his fidelity. In ‘An Autumn Penitent,’ perhaps the fidelity is most agonized and most perfect. The story is simple and the ‘singular inner consecration’ to which Mr. Callaghan surrenders his chief character, Joe, is familiar. A husband, a wife, a niece are living comfortably together in a small village outside Toronto. A young Baptist preacher begins a series of revival meetings in early summer which are to terminate in a public baptism in the fall. The women are interested, are converted. Joe is not interested, not godly, but sympathetic. One evening while Joe is in the hotel on a small party, the niece tells the wife she is pregnant by her uncle Joe. Instead of going to church the two women go down by the river and drown themselves. Joe meditates the rest of the summer and in the fall is baptized in the lake — it is the best he can do for the dead, and he is sure from things he can remember that his wife would have liked him to be baptized. So Joe is made to realize himself and the dead; God and human fate. Everything in the story happens by necessity, and therefore freely. The reader is able to adopt the curious equanimity of the characters and to share intimately in the inner consecration.
“This is the sort of story Mr. Callaghan sets forth at his best; and the best is a good half by quantity.”
An Exchange of Letters and A Letter Discovered
Morley Callaghan wrote to Ernest Hemingway:
Oct. 11, 1925
Dear Hem —
Here are three stories... I’ve quit the Star. I’m now a law student. Have a lot of time and could do a good deal of writing if I knew how I stood... I am not liable to get a swelled head from too much encouragement here. With one or two exceptions, anybody who reads a story of mine maintains a respectful silence. Do you think my stories are too bare?
Morley
October 22, 1925
Dear Cal —
The three stories came this morning. I’ve just finished reading them... 1st, “The Wedding Dress” story, which is a hell of a good story... Christ don’t be an ass and say you could go on and write if you knew how you stood etc. God knows you’re in the most depressing and discouraging surroundings — but that’s what makes a writer. You have to catch hell... If y
ou want encouraging and backing let me tell you right now and you can cut this out and paste it in the front of your prayer book that you have the stuff and will be a hell of a fine writer and probably the first writer that’s ever come out of Canada.
Yours always,
Hem
Morley at age 15, c. 1918
Morley at age 17 or 18, with friends near his home at 35 Wolfrey Avenue, Toronto, c. 1920
Café du Dôme, Paris.
Morley in the living room of the apartment with the family dog, Maizie, 1950.
Morley at his 1931 portable Underwood, at the front window of his family apartment, 123 Walmer Road, Toronto, 1950.
Edmund Wilson and Morley sharing lunch by the Sugar River, Talcottville, NY, 1963. Photo by M.B. Callaghan
“The friends he drank with every afternoon at the Roof Bar in the Park Plaza thought they belonged to the world outside. They talked about what was going on in Paris, New York, and London . . . all the trends in the world’s capitals.” from In the Dark and the Light of Lisa, 1972
“They drove to the corner of the two hotels, the Museum, and the broad avenue leading down to the colleges, parked the car and took the elevator to the Roof Bar.”
Morley Callaghan at the Roof Bar, 1959
Morley at work in his 20 Dale Avenue study, where he wrote most of his books, including his final novel, A Wild Old Man on the Road (1988). Photo by Dick Loek, The Toronto Star
Callaghan, La Coupole, 1986
THE EXILE CLASSICS SERIES
THAT SUMMER IN PARIS (No. 1) ~ MORLEY CALLAGHAN
Memoir 6x9 247 pages 978-1-55096-688-6 (tpb)
The Complete Stories of Morley Callaghan: Volume One Page 27